I know these are old books and are C and C++ oriented, but it helped me a lot during my formative years and helped me transition from being a decent programmer to being a decent engineer. They are short books which are well written and not very dense.

The efficiency and comments part read like a tl;dr version of Kernighan & Pike The Practice of Programming[1], which, I might add, is an excellent read.
As for coding conventions, I quite like OpenBSD's (man style)[2], which are also present on FreeBSD. Though I rarely write C these days, I have to read some every now and then, and code from BSD projects following those conventions feels very readable.

Once you're down with those references play around with the Zend Framework

It's not hard at all. PHP is an easy coding language to learn. Though some employers want you to know ASP. B

I was in the same situation. I got laid off 6 months ago, and picked up PHP>HTML>CSS>JAVASCRIPT> reading Oreilly books (you can get them off bittorrent). I have don't have a tech background. My degree is in philosophy. I built my own website.